


Pure Coincidence

by Red Dragon (Red_Dragonn)



Series: Sliptime [2]
Category: Licanius Series - James Islington, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Gen, Sliptime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 04:18:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13227921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red_Dragonn/pseuds/Red%20Dragon
Summary: A not-dead, ridiculous and entirely, literally, unexpected ancient worldhopper meets two more not-dead, semi-expected worldhoppers. Madness ensues. None of this is coincidence.





	Pure Coincidence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChaoticTrickster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChaoticTrickster/gifts), [pen_and_sword](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pen_and_sword/gifts), [alittleoff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittleoff/gifts), [KrakenMo (goldenKnife)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenKnife/gifts), [SolsticeGelan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolsticeGelan/gifts).



> this is for you guys. Happy holidays, and may this year be prolific in its gifts and whatnot. blah blah blah, i'm sure you'd rather me not wax poetic and just let you get to the story. :D

Andrael, who was many other people but never the right one at the right time, paced back and forth on the edge of a chasm and felt the world shifting around him inexorably. Right on time, _that_ was. Despite himself, his lips quirked up the sharp-edged grin that was his singularly cutting knife. Fortune had led him this far, and it would continue to lead him. 

‘This far’ happened to be the middle of the Shattered Plains in the middle of a highstorm, but he knew there had to be some reason for it.

The last of the Riddens were drying up around him, and so his black military coat was drenched and torn from the storm’s force. This was not coincidence, because there were no coincidences. The damage to the distinctive style of that aforementioned coat would make it much more difficult for someone to identify its cut and make; naturally that made things much easier for confused worldhoppers. And Andrael _was_ here to meet a worldhopper. 

Or, at least, he thought he was. In all honesty, he wasn’t _quite_ sure what he was doing here. He just knew he _should_ be, because he always should be doing something. And there were no coincidences. He’d learned that a good long time ago. Fortune favors those who recognize her hand in things, and there hadn’t been anything suitably interesting in _such_ a long time—

A windspren tied his shoelaces together and sped off.

Andrael bent to see what had happened and what spren it had been, tripped awkwardly, and fell directly into the chasm. Storms above, that was unfortunate. Once he’d stopped falling and made sure most of his bones remained unbroken, he patted his pockets and discovered that the very ugly rock he’d been possessed of the mind to pick up had splintered into perfect diamond-shaped sections of star ruby. There were six of them. This was not a coincidence. They all glowed faintly of stormlight, and so Andrael had a great many lights to guide him in this pitch-dark place. Of course, his spheres he’d been holding in that pocket had shattered all in the glass, but that was of no importance; spheres were replaceable, and they glowed all the same. Still, his fingers bled where he pricked them on the sharp edges. 

This was not a coincidence, because there were no coincidences. Evidently, he was not to climb out just yet. 

Instead, he sat down and began humming to himself from on top of a big rock. High above him him, the storm ended completely and the sun rose. Its light was too faint to reach him.

* * *

Something hit him in the head and clattered to the chasm’s floor. A pebble. Another hit him on the shoulder, and he looked up.

There was someone standing on the other edge of the chasm. 

The person probably said something, but Andrael couldn’t quite make it out. He couldn’t see them at all. 

_Well. This is awkward,_ Andrael thought to himself. _Guess I’m not finding any more dead Venerate_. 

He rolled his shoulders, tried out a slightly different grin, and became a different version of himself. And with that, Hoid began to climb out of the chasm. 

* * *

There was a glassy-eyed child, or a teenager, or simply a small adult, sitting on the top of the chasm, and she stared at Hoid with a singular intensity he was only used to from another, vaguely similar child. 

This one, much like young Brightness Davar, was a semi-unsettling semi-teenager with semi-shardlike powers. That is, she was a _storming_ Radiant. Roshar was up to its damn eyes in Radiants lately. 

Hoid put on his Hoidiest whitespine-grin and raised his eyebrows at the tiny girl.

And then he noticed the conspicuous lack of a glove or a safehand sleeve.

“Hello,” said Hoid, and the girl twitched with surprise, stood up, and tried to knock him back into the chasm. 

“Well,” said Hoid, hanging over the edge by one hand while the other got out a ruby, “I can’t say this is the worst welcome I’ve ever gotten; it—”

“Be quiet, quiet. Quiet,” the girl said sharply, kicking at his fingers. Now that he was at a better angle, he figured she was probably fifteen or sixteen. _Exactly_ like Shallan, but significantly more intolerable. This was almost undoubtably not a coincidence.

Fortune, clearly, was not feeling incredibly favorable today.

Hoid raised his eyebrows again. “Why?”

She paused, boot poised over the top of Hoid’s already-bloodied, glass-injured fingers. “Why _what_? You’re a strange man who climbed out of a hole in the ground and have a red fates-cursed glow in your pocket. I don’t trust it. Get back in your hole. Back, back. I don’t trust like that.”

Hoid affected an expression of deep hurt. “I found myself in a tight spot—”

The girl proceeded to plant her heel in the middle of his face.

Hoid had had enough. He got a foothold and threw himself physically into the air, easily clearing the lip of the cliff. It must have been an incredibly elegant and impressive show, but the child didn’t seem much moved. Great. 

He stepped very quickly away from the chasm and sat down. “So,” he said. “I’ve been introduced to the bottom of your shoe. Might I be introduced to its wearer?”

She jerked her gaze strangely over to where her spren was lurking and then, exaggeratedly, shrugged. She had an _honorspren_. Interesting.

The spren said, in a voice Hoid wouldn’t have known but Andrael could never have forgotten, “Why would I know what to do here? You’re right, it seems strange. Do whatever you feel is right.”

Hoid went back to being Andrael. It was the only thing to do. There were no such thing as coincidences. 

The girl _lunged_ for him, knocking him to the stone with her hands around his neck. Andrael twisted and broke her grip, but she was clearly trained. Trained, but awkward, as though she were used to…a different form… 

“Shammaeloth!” Andrael yelped. Not because he was naming anyone, but because he was trying really hard to come up with a name that would make her _know_ that he knew, in a general way, that she was at least Venerate. There could be no doubt. She definitely had Meldier. “Venerate! Diarys, Tal’kamar, Asar Shenelac, Wereth, Tysis, Gassandrid—”

The girl rocked back on her heels and _stared_ at him, her eyes suddenly far sharper. “Who in _fates_ are you?”

“A lot of people,” Andrael said, getting to his knees and sketching a theatrical bow. “You can call me Hoid.”

She didn’t respond for a long second. 

“And who would that make you?” she demanded eventually, tactlessly. Without a single ounce of _subtlety_. And armed with that, he took a guess. 

“Someone who has lived too many lives,” he said lightly. “As have you. Isiliar, as I live and breathe?”

The girl stared at him. Meldier seemed to be very carefully pretending to drift in the wind and seem unimportant. “Who _are_ you?”

“Who are _you_?” he countered. “And tell Meldier I can see him; I think he assumes his invisibility relies on his ignoring _me_.”

Meldier jumped, and spun into a tiny whirling storm of dust before he could help himself and then reformed back into a tiny blue man. “You can?”

“See you? Yes,” Andrael said. 

“Then answer Isiliar’s question. Who _were_ you?”

Andrael shrugged. “One of the Eleven, though perhaps not one you’ll feel all too charitably towards. Thought that can mean a lot of things. I—”

 _“Andrael_ ,” Isiliar hissed. 

Andrael definitely didn’t look caught, and that was only because of a good deal of luck and a greater deal of acting. That didn’t mean it was, by any stretch of the word, _true_. 

“That’s me,” he said. “Although some people would call me Cephandrius in that tone of voice, and others Wit, and others Drifter, and others other things entirely.”

She glared at him. “Less than two weeks ago, I was in a fates-cursed sea made of glass. Glass. And now I’m on a planet where the storms are so bad I nearly _died_ ,” she gritted out. “A week before that, I had your damn sword cut across my windpipe—”

“Someone’s been actively killing off Venerate?” Andrael cut in.

“Yes,” said Meldier. “Tal’kamar. Bastard.”

Andrael raised an eyebrow. At this rate he would have to start adding eyebrows onto his face so he could keep raising them. Both of his eyebrows were currently raised. He reluctantly surrendered them to gravity. There was no point in removing his dubious expressions in the future for the sake of preserving them in the now. “Of all the people, _Tal?_ Not, say…hmm…Cyr?”

Meldier looked down. Isiliar looked up. Both studiously avoided his gaze. “Cyr’s not dead, is he?”

“He’s not right,” Meldier said. “Tal’kamar tortured…him. I don’t know what happened, but I think…something…”

“You think he _something_? Immensely clever deduction. The scholars of this world will be _raving_ about your contributions to the sciences.”

Meldier bristled, morphing quickly from what looked like a sword to a shard of glass and then back to human, all in the space of a half-second.

“Meldier is convinced that Cyr somehow came from this world,” Isiliar said, “due to his ravings about highstorms and spheres and his insistence that his name is _Kaladin_.” 

_What_. “Kaladin, a…slave-bridgeman, that Kaladin?”

Meldier _startled_. “Yes.”

“Well, good news!” Andrael said. “He _is_ really a guy from this world. He may or may not be learning to play the flute.”

“Why would he be learning to play the _flute_?”

“Why would Tal’kamar torture one of the Venerate?”

Meldier blinked. “That has nothing to do with the flute?”

“On the contrary. Both are questions that require an answer, but not right at this moment.” Andrael let the easy facade of Hoid fall back into place; it would be simpler. “For now, my blue friend, we should find something to do with you and Isiliar and something better to do with my time.”

He considered the surroundings, and his ability to make a properly dramatic exit, and then considered the amount of sheer awful that he assumed a fall off this cliff into the chasm would be for the second time in one night, and deemed it good enough. He straightened up from his spot on the ground and prepared to step back into space—

“Wait!” Meldier said. “Stop!”

He stepped back more, started to fall.

“Where’s Asar Shenelac?”

He caught himself on the lip of the cliff with the other hand. “ _What_?”

“Asar,” Meldier said. “Asar is dead too. Where is he?”

“Who knows?” said Hoid. “Probably still somewhere in the Cognitive Realm; and on that matter, how did you end up a spren?”

Meldier blinked. “What do you mean—”

“We take the bodies of someone who’s dying,” said Hoid. “It’s the easiest way out, and the only one for one of us. Not by design. It’s a lot like the Chamber. But you’ve never come back as, say, one of the Shalis.”

Meldier shuddered. No, he had not. 

“Well, then, maybe,” Hoid swung himself back up, the urge to pace and think taking him over. A sharp grin curved up from his mouth almost against his will. _This means a lot of things._ “Well. Honor is dead, Meldier,” he said. 

Meldier stared at him. “Yes, that is something the spren seem fond of saying—”

“Tanavast is dead, sure, and apparently that gives _you_ free reign to run around in broken pieces of him.”

“What.”

Hoid had paced far enough in one direction; he threw himself towards the ground and somersaulted into another direction at random. By chance this direction was exactly the opposite of the one he had just been walking, and also by chance he landed perfectly on his feet. By chance, of course, and lots of hard work. But it would _look_ effortless, and Hoid was all about making difficult things look effortless and effortless things look difficult. 

“You’re a tiny Shard of a god,” Hoid said. 

“What, like one of the Venerate were?”

“No,” Hoid said. “Sort of. Yes. Maybe. I’m not sure. Ask me again in a week.”

“How are we going to find you in a week?”

“Fortune. Chance. Coincidence. Maybe by turning up at the Alethi warcamps to the east, I’ve made a habit of insulting the brightlords at some of the parties. Perhaps you’ll hear someone playing music and it will be me, or maybe not. We’ll meet again when it’s time.”

And with that, he kicked off the edge of the cliff and backflipped directly into the chasm. 

Because there is no such thing as a coincidence, he’d thrown himself ever so slightly out too hard and hit the wall almost a quarter of the way down. And because there is still no such thing as a coincidence, his ripped coat snagged on a rock and managed to suspend him in the air, and he considered the fact that though there were not many available handholds, there did seem to be some kind of rockbuds growing nearby. And of course, because there was no such thing as coincidence, rockbuds made absolutely _excellent_ stepping-stones.

Hoid couldn’t quite _reach_ the rockbuds, because nothing could ever just be _easy_ , but there were no coincidences, and he was wearing a very Awakenable and very already ruined coat, wasn’t he? 

He considered the question for less than a second before he was pulling a jagged piece of glass out of his pocket—of course, there were no _coincidences_ , he knew it would be useful for something—and started cutting up his sleeve. He huffed out a breath. A Breath. “Grab rockbuds,” he commanded it, flinging out his hand—his coat gently bled from black to snow-white—and began the second arduous climb to the top of a chasm he’d had to endure today. In the distance, he could see Meldier flitting around Isiliar as they worked their way towards the warcamps. 

Andrael smiled slightly to himself, and then let the ancient Venerate fall fully to the wayside. He had things to be doing.

Besides, should Fortune deign to bring him to another one of his old friends? He would need to have his act together. He had a lot of work to be doing before he stumbled across Asar Shenelac.


End file.
